


Ten more reasons why Danny (in)definitely needs to stay at Steve’s place

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: 5 Times but it's 10, Coda, Gen, Humor, h50 season 10, take your pick of whether they’re bffs or kinda married or in a qpr or banging like a screen door, this fic contains claims about mice in Hawaii that should not be taken as factual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:13:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22965973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: And then the timeframe on his excuse runs out, he packs his bags, he goes back home, and the next morning his bags are somehow with him at the office and he’s telling Steve he’ll need to stay over for another six to eight weeks because he discovered a sewage problem. And it’s true, he did: his excuses to move in with Steve are full of shit.Or: Danny doesn’t go home, and then doesn’t go home, and then doesn’t go home again (because he’s already there).
Relationships: Steve McGarrett & Danny "Danno" Williams, Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 34
Kudos: 287





	Ten more reasons why Danny (in)definitely needs to stay at Steve’s place

**Author's Note:**

> Some background: in 10.09 Danny moves himself into Steve’s house by claiming he found mold in his kitchen and we’re told (through a talk Steve has with Lou) that Steve knows that’s total nonsense, but lets Danny stay with him anyway because he knows Danny is worried about him. This fic started out as a coda to 10.11, in which Danny moves out and then back in the next day (because he apparently found a sewage problem in his house that might actually be real – canon doesn’t tell us), or to 10.13, in which Danny just randomly still lives with Steve, but then he stayed and stayed and honestly, at this point this fic is essentially just a general coda for the middle of season 10, rather than related to any specific episode. 
> 
> It does divert from canon somewhat pre-10.16, because that’s when they had Steve tell Danny in actual words that he shouldn’t hurry back home if it’s still under construction and that Danny can stay as long as he likes, which was perfect and wonderful but also didn’t totally fit with what I’d already written for this, so for the purpose of this fic, ignore anything post-10.15, please.

###### 0.

The excuse Danny makes up about finding mold in his kitchen is a total fabrication. Danny knows it, Steve knows it, and Danny knows that Steve knows and vice versa. It’s debatable whether Junior knows – for such a sharp kid, he can be a little gullible sometimes – and Eddie definitely doesn’t suspect a thing, but Danny is fairly sure nobody else in their Five-Ohana is fooled for even a second. 

Which is fine, because the only thing they’d be learning from it anyway is that he cares about Steve, and “Danny Williams cares about Steve McGarrett” is the kind of hard-hitting factoid that anyone with either eyes, ears or one-tenth of a monkey’s brain should be able to figure out. It’s not like that’s something that needs to be hidden or that Danny feels embarrassed about. The reason for his lie is, in the first place, not that there is a need to hide anything, but mainly that it’s easier on both him and Steve. (Say openly that he’s moving in to keep an eye on Steve in the aftermath of yet another life-defining trauma and Steve is guaranteed to get flustered in that SEAL way he has where he looks like he doesn’t really know how to handle a feeling that he can’t work out by shooting at it, and it’ll get to Danny too and they’ll just both end up awkward around each other for a couple of days. Giving a valid reason, no matter whether it’s the truth or just convenient, gives them both an out. It’s all working perfectly and Danny is entirely confident he made the right decision.)

And then the timeframe on his excuse runs out, he packs his bags, he goes back home, and the next morning his bags are somehow with him at the office and he’s telling Steve he’ll need to stay over for another six to eight weeks because he discovered a sewage problem. And it’s true, he did: his excuses to move in with Steve are full of shit.

The part about getting the issue fixed in six to eight weeks is probably still a lie, though.

*

###### 1.

Six to eight weeks later (well okay, nine weeks), Steve peers at Danny over the dinner table, chews thoughtfully on his garlic chicken, and says, “So how’s the construction work at your place coming along?”

Danny swallows his own food, which suddenly feels like a lump in his throat even though a moment ago he was incredibly happy with how this new recipe came out. “Fine,” he says, because he can’t really say anything else. Steve would’ve heard about it by now, at length, if it had been anything else.

Steve hums. It’s probably not meant as an accusation, but it kind of sounds like one. “So you’re moving out soon?”

“Not yet,” Danny blurts. “The walls just got a fresh layer of paint.”

“Ah.” Steve leans back in his seat. “Don’t want to poison yourself by breathing in those fumes.”

“Exactly. I knew you’d understand.” Danny stares Steve down, but Steve stares back, so they end up in an unintentional contest to see who will blink first.

It’s Junior. “I’m just gonna, uh, go wash my plate,” he says, and beats a hasty retreat to the kitchen.

*

###### 2.

“You know what, Danny?” Steve says, during their carpool to work another two weeks later. One of the benefits of their current living arrangements is that it’s made carpooling infinitely easier. Danny is saving the polar bears, one lame excuse at a time. “I think you may have set a new world record with how slow the paint in your house is drying. You should call Guinness and see what they say.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Danny shoots back, because that’s a fitting response to roughly ninety percent of what Steve says or does on a daily basis. “It’s dry. Obviously, it’s dry.”

Steve cocks an unsurprised eyebrow at the road. “Oh?” 

“Yeah. That’s not why I’m still staying at yours.” Danny has to think fast, so he goes for something he has recurring nightmares about. “Cockroaches. It’s an infestation. Very nasty.”

“Really? In a house that’s recently been done up and where they aren’t going to find any food because you’ve been eating from my fridge all this time?”

Danny hums. “Yes. That’s believable.” In hindsight, boldly asserting _I’m not lying_ might not be the best way to convince someone you’re not lying. Detective 101 slipped his mind for a moment there.

But Steve just grins, first briefly at Danny and then at the traffic, which makes no sense because it’s actually kind of terrible this morning. “Sure,” he agrees easily. “Totally believable. I believe you.”

“Well, why wouldn’t you?” Danny asks, which just makes Steve grin harder.

*

###### 3.

After that, he starts putting less and less care into his excuses. If he’s not fooling anybody anyway, there’s no real reason to go through the effort to make it sound good. Besides, sometimes lies write themselves, and end up not even being actual lies.

“We’re so busy with the case right now I just don’t have time to move all my stuff back,” is the next one, when Lou asks what the status of the cockroach war is during a hurried team lunch that really is in the middle of a case that’s been keeping them going for the past four days straight. No untruths there.

Steve is sitting right next to Danny, seemingly taking a power nap while he’s chewing on his BLT, but he still takes the time to mumble around his full mouth, “Yeah, makes sense.”

*

###### 4.

“Hey, by the way, the electricity company made a mistake and shut off power to my place,” Danny announces over breakfast, a week after they finish the case, catch up on many days of missed sleep and file all of the needed case paperwork in duplicate. He’s waking up out of his stress-related fugue state and suddenly remembering that his former excuse isn’t working out anymore. “I need to be close to your Wi-Fi to do work and get my daily dose of Grace, so I might as well stay.”

“Stalking her Instagram account is not actually healthy, you know?” Steve says, but Danny knows for a fact that Steve downloaded the Instagram app on his phone just to be able to follow Grace when she went off to college, so he’s got exactly zero legs to stand on in this fight.

*

###### 5.

There is probably a limit to how far a lack of Wi-Fi can viably be stretched, but Danny thinks he does pretty well by making it last a full month. It’s when they’re having dinner again (no Junior this time, because he’s out with Tani) and Steve opens his mouth and starts to raise a hand, like he’s about to ask Danny for the salad bowl, that Danny gets overtaken by a sudden case of nerves and the paranoid idea that Steve is going to ask him to move out. Before Steve gets the chance to utter a single syllable, he blabs, “Water pipe broke.”

“I figured,” Steve says, supremely unworried about all of Danny’s stuff potentially getting a bath. Well, all of Danny’s stuff that isn’t at Steve’s yet, anyway. Which excludes anything of great monetary value or any kind of personal attachment, but still. “Gimme that.”

Danny hands Steve the bowl that he makes grabby hands at. “Manners, Steven.”

Out of idiotic defiance, Steve reaches a hand into the bowl, grabs a lettuce leaf with his bare hand and stuffs it into his mouth, keeping eye contact with Danny. “This is my home. I’ll be as mannerless as I want when there are no guests around.”

Danny mutters something about animals and being unsure why he’s still surprised, but he _is_ surprised, a little later, when it hits him what Steve really said, and where that puts Danny in Steve’s mental categorization system.

*

###### 6.

“No water,” Danny informs Steve, two or three or four (or six) weeks later. He’s losing count. “Can’t shower, would starve of dehydration.”

Steve, who hadn’t asked and is given no context, nevertheless seems to understand what the hell Danny is getting at. He takes the plate Danny just washed and passes his tea towel over it, even though the cloth is too drenched after all the dishes they’ve already done to be a very useful tool in actually drying anything. “Damn. Your stroke of bad luck is legendary, buddy.”

Danny pulls the stopper to let the water in the sink drain away and goes on the hunt for a clean tea towel. He hands it to Steve, who takes it but seems about to claim that they totally didn’t need to sully a clean one, so Danny cuts him off. “That’s a fine thing for you to say. Nobody’s shot bullet holes in my house yet.”

“You’re never there anyway. Why would they shoot at it?”

Steve is putting away the well-dried plate, so he doesn’t see Danny rolls his eyes. He doesn’t see Danny almost slip up and smile, either.

*

###### 7.

If asked, Danny would probably consider himself a creative person. Not Michelangelo creative, perhaps, but certainly verbally imaginative, which would include a flair for telling stories. Even so, it’s starting to get harder and harder to come up with reasons why he can’t go home that he hasn’t used before. He’s playing with the idea of doubling back to an old one (a house might very well need to be fake painted again after a fake flood, after all, or perhaps the fake cockroaches are of a fake breed with fake stubbornness akin to a real McGarrett), when he gets a call from Rachel who, surprisingly, provides him with a very easy out. 

Danny breaks the news to Steve while he’s doing laundry on the couch and Steve is puzzling over a newspaper crossword at his dad’s old desk. “I have Charlie this weekend and he wants to go swimming. I figure we might as well stay here instead of moving back before then and dragging all our stuff back and forth.”

Steve, who’s been tapping a ballpoint pen against his chin in deep thought and now has some blue in his stubble, whips his head up with genuine excitement in his eyes. “We get bonus Charlie? That’s what Rachel called about?”

“Yeah,” Danny confirms. He balls up a pair of Steve’s socks and feels almost worryingly content doing it, just because Steve is now beaming at his crossword on the other side of the room.

*

###### 8.

Of course, not everything can be both true and heartwarming. Sometimes, more dramatic images are necessary to ensure that Danny doesn’t need to keep coming up with excuses every two days for the rest of his life. 

“Very local mini tornado,” he concocts, a few hours after Rachel picks Charlie up. It’s a lazy excuse, but it’s the best he can do. He’s having twenty percent of a nap in one corner of the couch while Steve is watching TV in the other, and he figures nothing can be much more suspect than too much water one week, and too little the next. “Roof got torn off. It’s bad.”

“Wow,” Steve says, with a lift of both eyebrows this time, and that’s all he says. Good thing too, because the local news that’s currently playing hasn’t mentioned anything about this destructive fictional tornado, either, so taking audience questions might have proven difficult.

*

###### 9.

Danny figures a tornado should give him a good three months, at least. He gives it four before he bothers to remember that he even still has a house he’s supposed to go back to, and even then it mostly happens because he takes a look at his bank statement and realizes he’s still paying rent. “Mice,” he tells Steve.

“Where?” Steve asks, glancing around his own backyard. They’re sitting in the two garden chairs, each on their own habitual side. They’re celebrating a sunny afternoon, nobody getting murdered today, and the nice chill of their beers, straight out of the fridge.

“Not here, my house. Can’t go back yet.” The ‘yet’ is a nice touch, he thinks. Makes it believable that he’s still planning on going back, ever.

Steve scoffs into his beer. “What, you’re afraid of a tiny mouse now?”

“I guess not,” Danny says, because Steve makes a fair point there. Mice in the kitchen can be nasty, but Danny’s never particularly minded rodents, definitely not ones that small. He’s not going to pretend to have developed a sudden phobia, so he’ll just have to make up something else. “They’ve stolen all my house keys and now I can’t get in anymore.”

Instead of asking any of the questions that would raise for a sane person, Steve rolls with it. “I still have my key. You can borrow it.”

Foiled again. “They replaced the locks.”

“The mice did?”

“Yes.” Danny meets Steve’s confused eyes head on. “Hawaii’s infamous locksmith mice. Shouldn’t you know this stuff, as kama’aina?”

Steve stares at him for a long moment. His expression is a little peeved, and more surprisingly, also a little fond. More than a little, really. “Must’ve missed that day of school,” he says, just when Danny thinks this is the moment that he’s finally about to be called out on his steaming heaps of nonsense. 

He is not. Instead, Steve just finishes off his beer, plants it in the grass beside his chair and lies back to enjoy the dappled afternoon light playing over his face, like locksmith mice settle the question in a wholly satisfactory manner. Maybe they do. It definitely feels like they mean something, even if it’s maybe not what Danny thought it would be.

*

###### 10.

Perhaps Steve feels the same way, because a while later (Danny’s long since stopped keeping an exact count of the days and weeks, because he knows he can always consult Steve’s nerd brain if he ever needs an exact timeframe) Steve asks, for the first time in many months, “So what’s the excuse of the week?”

They’re on the couch, watching commercials in the middle of Mission Impossible. Steve’s feet rest on the coffee table and Danny’s ended up in Steve’s lap somehow, one of Steve’s hands forming a warm brace around his ankle. “I’m just really comfortable. Don’t wanna move.” He only realizes the double meaning of that word – move – after he’s already said it. 

Steve looks at him like he’s trying to read his face for clues. “Is that another lie?”

“No,” Danny says. He doesn’t bother hesitating or acting surprised that Steve knows he’s been lying. It all just seems like a stupid amount of work for something really obvious. “This one’s completely real.”

“Well, I guess that means you should just stay indefinitely, then.” Steve is clearly trying to say it lightly, like it’s no big deal, but it sounds so cramped up it’s going to need some good stretches. Danny wriggles his feet a little in Steve’s lap to distract him.

“Sounds good to me. The lease on my place is up next week, anyway, so I was going to be moving in officially whether you wanted me to or not.”

A beat of silence. Apparently, he still managed to take Steve by surprise. “Or you could have not cancelled your contract what, a full month ago?”

“Two,” Danny admits. He’s slowly been selling his furniture on eBay for the past few weeks now. “But what’s in the past is in the past, Steve. Concentrate on your future.”

Steve’s hand flexes around Danny’s ankle. “Our future.”

“Yours, mine, our.” Danny lifts a hand to wave it dismissively. “Same thing.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, quietly. “I guess so.” When Danny looks up at him, he’s smiling at the tv. It’s playing a commercial for toilet paper, which gives Danny reason to believe Steve’s smile might not be for what’s happening on screen. He is given another reason when Steve seems to realize he’s being watched and looks down at him.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Steve says, in that way people do when it’s clearly something. At least it seems to be something good, so Danny’s not too worried. “I’m just glad you’re finally seeing sense.”

Danny scoffs at that. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t making up all of those excuses for my own benefit.”

“Hah,” Steve says, and he might have a point, even if Danny would be damned if he ever admitted it.

**Author's Note:**

> [insert complicated Mulan reference in which both Steve and Danny pretend to be Mulan asking Danny to stay for dinner but they’re actually the grandma yelling “would you like to stay forever?” right off the bat]
> 
> Thank you for reading!! Comments are as welcome as Danny is in every part of Steve’s house, life and heart.
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
